The Triumph of Profiling. Andreas Bernard
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Название: The Triumph of Profiling

Автор: Andreas Bernard

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Кинематограф, театр

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isbn: 9781509536313

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СКАЧАТЬ in 2010, he interpreted MySpace's indifference to the number and genuine nature of its users’ profiles as a decisive weakness and a target to attack: “MySpace was unconcerned with who you really were.”60 His own flourishing network, in contrast, required from the beginning that each user could only have one profile and that it had to be under his or her real name. “You have one identity,” Zuckerberg repeatedly maintained in the interviews, and he spoke of the “lack of integrity” associated with the multiple and fictitious profiles created on MySpace.61 According to his credo, “You can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self!”62 Of course, the reasons for this insistence on authenticity were more commercial than philosophical, given that, from the outset, the business has been able to provide advertisers with a lucrative supply of real names and addresses. Regarding the conception of humanity in digital culture and the disappearance of the early discourse about the multiple subject, however, this mantra of the “authentic self” represents a threshold: the anonymous or disguised ego has given way to an ego that is readily identifiable. Just a few years after its announcement, Barlow's fluid category of “authentic identity” in cyberspace congealed into something that could not be better suited for police surveillance.

      In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner framed the transitional process under discussion between two historical turning points: the campus protests at Berkeley in 1964, where students wore IBM punch cards around their necks to symbolize their powerlessness against the machinery of the university, and the publication of manifestos such as Negroponte's Being Digital and Barlow's “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in the mid-1990s. Turner's main objective was to explore how, within a period of 30 years, information technology was able to develop from a menacing and subject-inhibiting force into a sphere of social utopia and individual liberation. My considerations here about the status of the self in digital culture have described how this transformation has both progressed and regressed in recent years – developments that Turner, who completed his book before the advent of social media, could not have taken into account. For it ranks among the most irritating features of the current relation between subject formation and digital media technology that the promises of freedom declaimed during the pioneering years of the internet continue to provide the ideological basis of all new devices and services (every Apple presentation and every expansion of the sharing culture is an echo of the “virtual community”), while the methods of individualization – as shown by the development of the profile concept – are no longer intended to scatter subjects but rather to arrest them.

      Notes